eight weeks in asheville
intern season 🗻
welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj — always up to something in social good x tech. scroll to the end for a daily roundup of unique opportunities. :)
eight weeks in asheville 🗻
tl;dr — i spent 2 months in asheville, north carolina building an ai-based phone service for caregivers in 4 counties. i had a lot of fun learning, exploring the mountains & getting to know a lovely team.
along with sofia, ibrahim, and walter, morehead-cain placed us in asheville, north carolina to work with land of sky’s area agency on aging on improving the caregiver experience across the four counties they serve.
the project
we spent the first 2 weeks interviewing 40 different stakeholders from aging specialists to caregivers, while we sat in on different support group meetings. i wanted to gain a deep understanding of the true root cause to different problems impacting both the agency and the broader caregiving community.
so, we landed on the problem statement of:
caregivers are offered a plethora of resources allocated by the local government, but are unaware that they exist. we want to minimize the “overwhelming” burden of not knowing what resource to turn to or what resources exist in a 24/7 manner.
considering the opportunity ai introduces as well as the nature of older adults (not wanting yet another login to remember), we developed an sms + phone call native tool to effectively intake calls, resource requests, and provide a dashboard of escalated tickets to the agency staff.
to summarize what exactly we built:
interface (i owned this): twilio programmable messaging + voice — calls auto-forward to the agency line, while every voice/sms interaction spawns a ticket.
knowledge layer: retrieval-augmented generation (rag) via pinecone vector store (openai embeddings) holding only vetted local caregiver resources.
workflow (i contributed to this piece): python microservice writes/updates tickets in airtable — specialists see a real-time dashboard, call users back, or autoclose resolved threads.
continuous curation: public web form → airtable queue → ai validation agent → pinecone ingestion.
you can see the exact flow / demo of the tool here.
amazingly, land of sky has fully adopted this new tool and workflow since it has been shown to make their lives easier, rather than just introducing more issues to navigate. (:
highlights
we went on a lot of hikes and woke up to the beautiful mountains every morning. hiking bearwallow multiple times during sunset was definitely a top 3 moment.
at first i wasn’t thrilled with my placement being asheville — i wanted to leave nc for the summer, but the city was surprisingly lively with hundreds of restaurants and cafes with amazing food.
irene visited during 4th of july and we watched the fireworks!
it was especially meaningful to speak with vernon and joyce robinson, who run dementia partners asheville during their caregiver support groups.
all of the great food catered to the office. <3
we hit up a candlelight coldplay concert, which was beautiful.
binging different movies and shows with the team every night.
key takeaways
debunk assumptions asap → our initial idea was to build some sort of app or platform, but seniors don’t want to remember yet another password. we had to go in the community and actually validate tech usage. assumptions are landmines — i learned to suss them out immediately.
playbooks are important → i could be super excited about the tech and get ahead of myself, but at the end of the day a product is useless if people can’t actually implement it in their systems with ease. so, i spent a lot of time writing out playbooks and every step by step instructions for land of sky’s implementation.
calibrate → our intern team lived and worked together. the reason we were so successful (both in terms of completing this project and not running into any real tensions) is because we calibrated early and got on the same page. and, we continued to do so. we realigned every day.
gratitude
a large part of what made this experience wonderful was just how wonderful the land of sky team, namely leeanne, was. we were supported every step of the way and treated with respect.
i’m also especially grateful for my team. we worked together so well and i always felt comfortable to speak my mind. many great memories, that i’ll hold closely, were made.
finally, a huge thank you to morehead-cain for facilitating this experience for us.
i had a blast and learned a lot. (:
onto the next thing!
today’s drops 🔍️
are you a student? spend 2 months in sf building your company with $20k-$100k
research & ai internship @ veox
attend internpalooza in sf next month (august 4th)
i also write a bi-monthly update focused on my work and project updates if you’d like to check that out here.
want to post an opportunity on my blog? shoot me a line at harsehajx@gmail.com.
teehee,
harsehaj